


Alice Quinn’s Grand Unified Theory of Magic

by messier51



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Analysis, Canonical Character Death, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Meta, Narrative Analysis, Other, References to Depression, The Magicians 4.13, The Magicians Meta, The Magicians season 4, open letter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-22 21:21:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18535720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/messier51/pseuds/messier51
Summary: An open letter to Sera Gamble and John McNamara, in which I discuss the narrative shortcomings of the season 4 finale. Though the season had built up a number of excellent character arcs and spun many interesting plot threads with meaningful themes, it unravels them all in the finale in unsatisfactory ways in favor of performative shock-horror of character death.





	Alice Quinn’s Grand Unified Theory of Magic

An Open Letter to Sera Gamble and John McNamara:

I began watching The Magicians in the fall of 2018 because my best friend suggested it to me. We do this with stories we enjoy all the time; books, TV shows, movies, comics, games, all of it. We both love stories, and we love complicated, messy things about downtrodden garbage characters making terrible choices for what they hope are all the right reasons and then dealing with the consequences of their actions. Naturally, Scorn (my friend) was right about The Magicians, and I fell in love. Season 3 and season 4* especially, are some of the best storytelling I’ve seen on TV in a long time. (*up until the season 4 finale). Great themes, tight character arcs, relatable motivations. Characters choosing to do the wrong thing because they are emotionally driven by their complicated relationships with other, also-complex and nuanced characters.

Part of the reason that season 3 and 4* work so well are because the show builds a foundation for trust. Yes, The Magicians tells hard stories. Rape, suicide, pedophilia, depression, death of a loved one, loss of bodily autonomy, drug overdose, loss of a child, fascism. The show does not shy away from hard topics, and I believe this is an important choice. Stories need to be told about terrible things, and in ways that do not glorify the trauma, but show how people can survive them and how they can do so with support from others. The show has not always done a perfect job of this, but it's been very honest and surprisingly nuanced in each of these stories, turning something that starts off looking like an unfortunate story choice into something nuanced, complicated, and character-driven. These topics and especially their consequences are treated with respect, and that creates space for the viewer to trust the story, even when it goes somewhere a little dark, a little scary.

And the show definitely had to gain my trust. I had read about a chapter of the first Magicians book by Lev Grossman years ago before I gave up in boredom and disgust. The main character was obnoxious and unrelatable and his motivations were nauseating. I’ve also watched Supernatural, and while I always enjoyed the episodes you wrote, and I loved the cohesive mytharcs of season 6 and 7, I also feel like these seasons suffered in how they doled out trauma purely for the sake of trauma and in how they handled character death--including the gratuitous writing-off of a beloved main character.

I have tried a great deal to hold myself back from comparing Supernatural to The Magicians because it seemed like, in retrospect, there have been a lot of hands in the pie at spn and it’s awfully disingenuous to assign blame for things going wrong to a young woman in charge. I thought you had fucking learned something from that experience--here you were, writing a show with so many women. Writing a show where a possessed character isn’t magically cured with effectively no consequences after 2 episodes. Where [close, intimate relationships between male characters](https://messier51.tumblr.com/post/184275476842/justanotheridijiton-the-magicians-queliot) is seen as an important aspect of the story instead of clickbait-y subtext to keep the rabid part of the fanbase happy.

Even within the text of The Magicians, it seemed like by season 3 there was an overall tonal shift away from trauma porn to something more balanced. From a story perspective, by the way? This improved things tremendously. When a person reads or watches (or lives) something that provides trauma after trauma after violent trauma, they’ll start to feel numb. Numb about the story, about the pain. It starts to matter less. This isn’t _good_ storytelling;it’s not the emotional ride that a good story promises. This is where season 2 of The Magicians fails, by the way. Sometimes, you have to have something good happen. Some happiness, some light, between all the dark and the pain. This is called _contrast_. The hope part? It’s important. If I can’t hope that things might turn out well, then there are no stakes. If everything is just going to go bad, there’s no story--the story depends on possibility and making it look like the characters have options; that sometimes things will work out DESPITE all of the horrible things going on.

Season 3 and 4* have contrast. They have light moments and promise and hope in there amongst the darkest shadows and pain. There’s a reason the _Idea of Fillory_ is worth living for, because there’s hope in there.

Now, there have definitely been things on the show I have disliked. It has, since the very first episode, always bothered me that Quentin is told that magic comes from pain, and that he--a depressed and suicidal character--needs to throw away his medications in order to do something wonderful. This particular storyline sounds too much like the widely-held real life belief that artists can create more beautiful or greater artwork through channeling their depression, and that medication would destroy that. It’s not only untrue, it’s a very harmful belief, and to see it symbolically repeated in a fantasy metaphor was unsettling. But I gave it a chance anyway, and the show gave me plenty of other reasons to trust it.

Scorn and I had so many discussions about trust and The Magicians, too. In the broader scope of genre television (and books) and especially with respect to queer media. There are a lot of scifi/fantasy books doing a really great job of telling queer stories now (Tor.com alone has about a million of them) and we’ve been really excited to see this reflected in genre shows on TV. What’s been really exciting to me, watching Eliot, especially, is how we have a very visibly queer character on TV who is not suffering _because_ he is queer, but instead, he suffers the same as every other character on the show, because they are human, and fuck up. I want to see queer characters in dangerous and painful situations, just like everyone else. I do not want to see characters that I identify with be held aside in safe cages where they are safe from everything--including interesting and meaningful stories.

Seeing Quentin Coldwater, depressed supernerd and main character, fall in love with Eliot Waugh? Was amazing. It wasn’t treated like a big deal. There was no coming out story or queer panic. We saw them intimate and in love, and we got to see the _apparently_ “white heterosexual male lead” character revealed to be one of the most relatable characters on TV: a queer depressed grad student millennial who never seems to be able to live up to his dreams or to be quite what the world needs at any given point in time. It was the kind of queer subversion of text we always hope to see.

Side note? It’s really amazing to see graduate students represented on television. We are, in fact, approximately that good at accomplishing any given task. And depression and mental health are VERY SERIOUS considerations for graduate students. Study after study is finding that graduate school not only attracts people who are predisposed to emotional exhaustion and other mental health troubles, but exacerbates most mental health issues like anxiety and depression. So seeing grad students living with depression and mental health trouble and (mostly) succeeding without either magically curing their depression or suddenly feeling better just because they’ve accomplished something, is really gratifying. Now, like art? We’re actually generally way better at accomplishing things when we’re medicated, getting therapy, and/or otherwise managing our mental health in proactive ways.

Killing Quentin Coldwater does not take away from the fact that he was fascinatingly new and different bisexual representation on screen. It does not make the sexual and romantic storylines that have played out between Eliot and Quentin to varying degrees since season 1 any less real. We got to see queer characters on screen telling interesting stories and their relationship was important to the story for reasons other than just because it was _queer_. And that is excellent.

Because I’m interested in diverse and representative stories and not _only_ domestic fluff romance stories, I don’t think that queer characters should be held to a different set of standards when it comes to trauma and death. It is important to me to have flawed stories about queer characters, because stories will always be flawed, and that’s part of the beauty of storytelling. My personal line comes in when violence against queer characters happens _because_ they are queer, and that clearly isn’t what happens on The Magicians. The queer characters suffer for the same reasons everyone else does, in the same amounts. And more generally, I think that _Bury Your Gays_ should be treated as a structural, statistical basis for changing storytelling and not an individual mandate levied against any creator who ever even considers harming one hair on some maligned queer character’s head.

But I gotta say. When you set up a storyline, where a male character asks another male character to maybe try finding some happiness in a romantic life together, and then you let that character THEN also spend a whole season making terrible choice after terrible choice just because he wants to get the character he confessed to--the one who turned him down, by the way, and then unbeknownst to the first guy, rethinks that choice--back home safely? You have set up a _very_ romantic plot. Whether that was your intention or not. And if you didn’t realize that? Fucking Shame On You as a writer. And then, after asking the same question, over and over in your story: _Why Eliot? Why are you putting so much at risk for him?_ You… never answered the question. Yes, in real life, we don’t always get moments to say goodbye to the people we love. Things happen in a blur, and we don’t get closure.

It’s a good thing that stories are exactly the same as real life. Oh wait, lemme read my notes, no--it’s the opposite of that.

You know, it’s notable that Quentin and Alice get a few sweet moments together before the end to remember how things were, once upon a time. And to provide extra pain. Like, I’m not saying that rekindling a bit of romance just to kill off one of the characters is a useful plot device, but IT SURE DOES HELP CONTRAST to show the happy alongside the sad. But it’s noteworthy that Quentin and Eliot do not get a similar moment at all; despite being textual and not (as is usually the case) relegated to subtext, the m/m relationship still does not rate the sort of textual treatment as the m/f relationship. (And like. How does one pass up the opportunity for letting them have a little bit of that happiness because that opens up a whole new world of bad choices that Quentin and Eliot could be making on account of exploring these new and old confusing feelings for each other.)

While we’re here, let’s talk a little bit about recontextualization and why Escape from the Happy place (4.05) is such a powerful piece of storytelling--because No Better to be Safe Than Sorry (4.13) does the same thing, but where 4.05 strengthens the story being told, 4.13 tears it to shreds. When 4.05 aired, The Magicians got a lot of good press about queer representation and taking the subversive ideas of transformative fanfiction seriously. When 4.05 aired, it rewrote a season’s worth of episodes in a matter of moments. That’s _magical_. We can look at everything that happened with Quentin and Eliot from A Life in the Day (3.05) to 4.05 from a new point of view, taking into consideration the new information we get in 4.05. It then informs all of Quentin’s choices going forward as well. Episodes are part of a bigger storyline and they don’t happen in a vacuum.

When 4.13 aired, it kind of felt like the episode existed in a vacuum.

Unlike 4.05, which recontextualizes the story at a character motivation level, the recontextualization we get from 4.13 is thematic. Instead of a story about choice and agency, we find out that we have a story about the loss of bodily autonomy. Instead of a story about characters finding ways to forge their own futures despite what kind of predetermined destinies have been written for them, we get a story that railroads a character right into the destiny that was specifically averted earlier in the season. And the worst part is that, in order to write a story which ends with Quentin Coldwater’s death, so many other character’s stories were sabotaged along the way.

The ends of stories are so important. C.L. Polk [tweeted about](https://twitter.com/clpolk/status/1118764130683346944) why the end of a story has to deliver answers to the narrative questions, because otherwise you lose your readers’ (or viewers’) trust. But it’s also the feeling that we’re left with when we finish a book, or a show season, or a movie, that last impression is going to color how we feel about the rest of it. If the story does a lot of great things but falls apart in the end, then all of those great things don’t matter, because there is no follow through. A happy story with a surprise sad ending is, all told, a sad story. A mostly dark and scary story that ends with hope is, all told, a hopeful story. So to have 10-12 episodes of truly amazing storytelling only to throw it out the window for a Major Character Death plotline in the end that does not match the apparent themes that the season has been espousing recontextualizes those themes for the entire season and leaves the story shallower and less fulfilling.

I want to be more specific about the character arc sabotage that takes place in 4.13, because again, the final episode recasts most of the characters into less-nuanced and flatter stories, and as far as I can tell, this is entirely driven by the predetermined choice to kill off Quentin Coldwater. So we know that, if Julia had become a goddess instead of being a human, she would have been able to save Quentin (or had a better chance at least). We also know that she’d probably choose magic over no magic, and that Penny has the ability to incept people’s dreams. Yet, Penny doesn’t even consider incepting Julia to ask her what she’d choose. Instead, he makes a selfish choice (and one at odds with his earlier interest in keeping her safe and alive at any cost) without her consent and she is rendered entirely human and powerless. Yes, she gets magic back at the end, and I’ll come back to that later--but this was a loss of autonomy for a rape survivor purely because any possible route to save Quentin needed to be shut down.

Then we have Alice’s story. Alice has a wonderful character arc about forgiveness and acceptance. She rediscovers her humanity, she finds new ways to look at how magic can be used for good and not only just for pain, she accepts her fears and her ambitions, and she forgives herself. When she reconnects with Quentin at the end of the season, it seems like it might be an extension of her character arc, as she’s accepting all of herself, including the humanity that she eschewed as a niffin and had such difficulty re-adjusting to after Quentin brought her back. Since love is a common shortcut in storytelling for demonstrating humanity (see: any story with robots and/or aliens) by having Alice seek out this reconnection with Quentin this seems like a possible logical conclusion for her story arc. However, after we find out that Quentin dies in 4.13, it shows that these sweet moments between Quentin and Alice were built up purely to drive emotional pain when Quentin dies. These scenes now accomplish nothing _else_ , because nothing comes of them. There’s no meat to it, just a few declarations and then pain.

Alice’s story entwines with Kady’s for a while too. Kady finds her own footing as a person this season. The experience of _doing the right thing_ as her season-starting alter-ego, Sam Cunningham, spins her into a story of fighting against authoritarian power and accepting responsibility when called upon. That responsibility includes leading the hedges and working with Zelda and Alice to fight against the fascist Library. Kady’s uncomfortable alliance with Zelda is a good foil for Zelda’s relationship with her mentor, Everett. As they become closer and work to understand each other and learn the truth about Everett and the Library’s underlying structural problems, Zelda’s relationship with Everett becomes strained. Zelda begins to atone for her mistakes (and I honestly thought she would not survive the season, because a heel-face turn combined with her promise to catch up with her daughter seemed like the perfect recipe for her to sacrifice herself for Kady and her new morals) but neither Zelda nor Kady get a chance to face Everett, the person they’ve been working against this entire season. It’s also notable that Quentin is not personally invested in the anti-Everett story, so his showdown with Everett at the end feels empty.

Quentin has not been struggling with the moral implications of the Library’s authoritarianism all season, or with the concept of power and control. He’s been struggling with the question of how to save his friends, the people he loves, and with the Monster’s actions as a consequence of his choice to prioritize saving Eliot over stopping the Monster. Everett assures Quentin that his friends will be fine if he hands over the Monster, but other than a general notion of Quentin wanting to do the right thing, this story climax doesn’t fit with Quentin Coldwater’s character arc--because it’s the payoff we’ve been told, by the story, that Kady (and Zelda) should get. So, in order to put Quentin in a situation where he’ll sacrifice himself--not for his friends, but for the general notion that a person with god powers is dangerous--Kady’s story is deprived of an ending.

It is notable that Everett with god powers is the exact same sort of person Quentin’s spent the entire season trying to stop in the Monster, so we could assume it’s because he doesn’t want to make the same mistake a second time, but the story doesn’t clearly make that connection here. (It also ends his story with Quentin making the same choice he attempted to make at the end of season 3, but this time none of his friends can interrupt him.) Instead of seeing Quentin wrestle with the idea of loosing another too-powerful monster on the world, we see Everett appeal to Quentin’s love of his friends. This is what we’ve been shown all along that his character is motivated by, and what the end of the episode reiterates was his reason for sacrificing himself. Like the memory of Quentin says in 4.05, “You sacrifice for the people you love.” Except that when Quentin actually sacrifices himself, he’s not actively saving anyone, and so his motivations don’t fit with his actual actions.

The Monster’s character arc is also unsatisfying. Despite the fact that he grows as a character into someone who cares about the world he’s living in and even some of the people there, none of this is addressed before he’s thrown into the seam. The Monster parallels Quentin all the way through the season. They both begin the season not knowing who they are or who they’re missing. They go on an emotionally exhausting quest that they think will get what they want: the Monster thinks he’ll get his body back and Quentin thinks he’ll get Eliot back. They’re both wrong. And they both spiral deeper into worse moods that feed off each other in co-dependently unhealthy ways: the Monster seeks substance abuse and thrills; Quentin is suicidal. They both finally get answers–though not the ones they were originally looking for. The Monster finds out he has a Sister and resurrects her, Quentin finds out his specialty is minor mendings and he resurrects his romantic relationship with Alice. And when we see Quentin’s monologue in the Secret Sea and he says his lines about getting everything you wanted but it’s not enough? That goes for the Monster, too. He’s got his Sister and he got his revenge on the four Librarian-gods, but she still wants more. He’s not enough for her. Because of all this, it makes sense, in the end, that each of their endings are a meaningless wastes of narrative potential that do not answer the narrative questions set up earlier in the season. 4.13 spends a lot of time _telling_ us that it’s better to get rid of the Monster and that Quentin’s death isn’t about his depression and suicide, but the episode doesn’t _show_ either of those things.

Compared to the others, Margo’s storyline just seems to stop completely before the finale. She doesn’t get to do anything, because her axes just _work_. There is no conflict left and after a whole huge arc about her becoming her own separate person from Eliot she reverts back to a role that’s all about him again. In sharp contrast to previous seasons, the only consequences of using the axes Margo acquired are cleared up within the episode--Julia gets de-goddess-ed and Eliot is injured, but not dead. There’s no lasting consequence of her story and none of the consequences are things she deals with, personally. (One example of a thing that could have gone wrong would be if the all the other creatures inside Eliot’s head that the Monster had consumed had been released along with the Monster when they used the axes.) The two major consequences for Margo in this story are losing Quentin (which has nothing to do with anyone other than Quentin) and more relevant to her own story arc, losing Josh to Fillory-past. Though losing Josh _might_ be related to the resurgence of magic caused by their actions, that’s not shown and her loss otherwise has nothing to do with her _personal_ choices, and therefore that loss feels distanced from her as a character.

The final example of character arc sabotage I want to give is for Eliot Waugh. Since he was confined to his mind for most of the season, his character arc is compressed, but he definitely still has one. In 4.05 and in The Serpent (4.09), we see him transform from oblivious layabout to driven superspy. This arc mirrors Eliot’s character arc for the entire show. At the start of season 1, Eliot projects a persona of the fabulous person he wants to be (an art project) in a sort of fake-it-til-you-make-it way. Season 1 destroys him and and he hides entirely in the harmful aspects of that persona and tries so hard to escape his own mind. He’s come a long way since then--helping Fillory and his friends was really good for him, but prior to season 4 he still hadn’t really had the chance to think about _himself_ much. While being possessed by a terrible Monster is horrific (mostly for bodily autonomy reasons), because he was inside his own head, Eliot got a chance to miss the worst of the trauma caused by the Monster. At the same time, he was not just hiding in his happy memories, like Charlton suggested he do. He explored both his own memories and the Monster’s. He might not have been the master of his body while possessed, but he finally had the opportunity to master his own mind–something he’d been hiding from.

Within Eliot’s specific season 4 arc, he gets to face his past and the choices that he’s made by visiting his literal memories. The goal of this journey is to find the thing he regrets most, and we find that in a memory where he rejected a chance at happiness. I think this is summed up really well by David Reed on the PKW podcast:

> It was that, an opportunity for happiness stood right in front of him, and instead of even considering the options, he just, snuffed it out right away and shut the conversation down. His distrust of actual happiness is, yeah, what we finally found is, maybe this is the teeny-tiny itch way inside of Eliot that drives everything else.
> 
> [[my transcription](https://messier51.tumblr.com/post/184216653147/hey-im-one-of-those-people-who-said-thank-you) | [PKW podcast](https://soundcloud.com/user-367560378/episode-405-escape-fro)]

Eliot also tells the memory of Quentin in that moment that he wants to be braver, and that’s because of Quentin, and it’s implied that he needs to be brave enough to try to be happy, and that Quentin is one of the things that makes him happy. This is not to imply that I ever expect characters on this show to get exactly what they want, or to be happy in any stable sort of way. But I do still expect narrative arcs to get some sort of resolution. When Eliot makes a resolution to face the possibility that he could be happy head-on, I expect the narrative to at least give him the chance to fuck that up. Unfortunately, he will never have that chance now, and we’re left with yet one more hanging thread.

Tangential to the character plots, there’s an interesting theme on the show that’s explored in more detail in this season about character vs. narrative. This is something we see in stories about destiny (Supernatural and Princess Tutu are two other TV shows that do this) where the character can face an in-story allegory for the external author who seemingly controls their destiny. People’s books in the Library are one example of this, the Flock of Birds comic books from the start of season 4 are another. In both of these cases, the characters are shown escaping the fate of the books: Julia breaks the fake identity spell by destroying the magic battery, and Quentin’s book fate is averted when he and Alice work together to make small changes in his story and change the timeline. With stories and destiny being so important, it’s interesting that Christopher Plover is introduced back into the story.

It appears, at the start, as if Christopher Plover has finally met his death in ~~Marry~~ , Fuck, Kill (4.04) when Alice pushes him into the Poison World well. We can believe that _maybe_ the characters have a chance at writing their own stories now--the author is (symbolically, and literally) dead! However, Plover returns, and with him, the insistence that no matter what you try to change it won’t matter, because people will not change their opinions of you, so you might as well just be yourself. (I know a whole bunch of fans who will tell you this isn’t true: it’s very easy to change your opinion of someone who breaks your trust.) This is another pro-destiny statement: just be who you were intended to be, don’t try to fight it. Let the story win. And in the end, the story does win. Quentin dies, a little later than his book says he would, but what’s a few weeks in the grand scheme of things.

From an extradiegetic point of view this seems to parallel the writing choices made on the show: interviews imply that the decision to kill Quentin Coldwater was made prior to writing the season, and everything written up to that point didn’t matter, because it would all end the way it was decided originally. I like that writing stories can be contrived in this manner; they’re not real life and we can decide how things end, regardless of how realistic it is. I also like that stories can be edited, and that sometimes ideas take on a life of their own, and since these are _stories_ we are writing, we have the ability to go back and edit them to match the new life they take on. I think “kill your darlings” is, like any writing advice, subjective at best--but in this case I think it might have been a good editing note. The finale of season 4 doesn’t fit thematically with the rest of the episodes. As discussed above, so many character arcs were narratively destroyed and the only common thread between them is that all of these things had to happen just for Quentin Coldwater to kill himself at the end of the season.

And Quentin Coldwater _did_ kill himself. It might not have been _specifically_ because he was suicidal, but his actions caused his own death. He pulled that trigger. I thought the scene where Quentin chooses to cast a spell rather than let Everett ascend to godhood was beautiful, and that his use of minor mendings was a wonderful character choice. But because, as I already described, he does not do so to save his friends, or out of any clear motivation tied to his character arc, his choice to destroy himself to stop Everett feels very impersonal.

I also mention above that even though we are _told_ that Quentin did not commit suicide, we are not _shown_ this. Quentin’s conversation with Penny 40 in the underworld about whether or not this was just a situation where he finally found a way to kill himself, or whether he died a hero, seems like a nice gesture at first glance. Except, when Penny says, “I think you know your answer now. The story for them, it's just starting but it won't be the same story because of you. You didn't just save their lives, you changed their lives as much as they changed yours,” he’s implying that Quentin’s death can’t be suicide because he changed his friends’ lives Only, those two things are not mutually exclusive. Someone who loves their friends can still commit suicide. Someone who helps others and changes their lives can still commit suicide.

Someone who argued earlier in the season that they’d faced gods before, and could do it again, and for whom we never see a clear point where he changes his mind about that does not have a reason to kill himself to stop Everett. Someone who has been so depressed that he won’t talk to his friends all season, who hides in books and research, who physically retreats into himself from one episode to the next, without much reprieve--and then dies? Even if it’s NOT suicide, it’s still a really bad look, as a story. The subtext is there, even if the dialogue says differently.

It’s also fascinating that Quentin seems a little less depressed in The 4-1-1 (4.11) and The Secret Sea (4.12) as well as in 4.13, before he kills himself. This is reminiscent of a real life phenomenon where a severely depressed person will be too apathetic to harm themself, but when they feel a little better they might suddenly have enough energy to act on those impulses. Even if this is unintentional, it still all adds up to an unfortunate depiction of a chronically depressed man spiraling into depression and finally dying. The more subversive message, the more interesting story here, would be to show him continuing to live, wanting to live--not despite his mental illness, but in the face of it.

Which brings me back to my last point, and my first and final complaints about The Magicians in its four seasons: the idea that magic comes from pain. We see this with Quentin at the start of the show when Dean Fogg bullies him into giving up his medications. However, despite Quentin’s massive amounts of pain (he is, as he has said, depressed and suicidal) his magic is not incredibly powerful. He’s kind of average, except sometimes, when his magic is more explosive. This alone seems inconsistent.

We finish season 4 with Julia finally able to do magic again for the first time all season, because of the pain caused by Quentin’s death. Apparently, a rape survivor who lost a lot of friends and then lost her memories and her ability to do magic, and then was possessed by Monster and lost the tiny bit of god-magic she DID have based on a choice that she didn’t get to make because someone took her agency away--none of that was painful enough. Her best friend’s death though, that did the trick. Julia was “at peace” before that though? Seems inconsistent with the story, but since we’re going with what we’re told instead of what’s shown, why not. We’re still back at to the terrible metaphor that art (magic) is fueled by depression.

This is also inconsistent with the notion that Julia was “like Hermione Granger” in timeline 23, as that’s a timeline where she went to Brakebills and therefore would not have gone through nearly as much trauma. Yet, she was still very powerful, and talented. So, just comparing her hedge witch travails with the little we know about her from timeline 23, it seems clear that magic does not scale with the magnitude of pain. Like with the Quentin example, it seems unreasonable that magic comes from pain.

We also see Alice Quinn, who is probably the most powerful of the Brakebills students on the show. She is so strong that she’s afraid of her full power. And her parents are pretty awful and she lost her brother, so maybe that’s why? But we’re back to the same problem of comparing different kinds of pain, and that’s terribly subjective. But then, using pain as a measuring stick or a requirement for magic in the first place is pretty fucked up.

As another small related tangent: the other thing that still bothers me from season 1 & 2 is the “seed of the gods” concept. Both Alice and Julia’s master magician level powers come directly from the ejaculate of more powerful men. It’s gross, it’s horrifying, and it’s never addressed in any satisfactory way by the story.

When Alice Quinn was a niffin, she learned as much as she could about magic. She’s obsessed with magic; it fascinates her and scares her. And yet even as a niffin, as a creature of pure magic, she couldn’t finish parsing magic at a fundamental level. However, the only thing Alice was missing as a niffin was the human element. It stands to reason, then, that the human element would be important to her grand unified theory of magic. Except, if magic really just comes from pain, it seems like that would be obvious. Alice the niffin was (demonstrably) capable of causing pain.

So let’s suggest a new hypothesis: Magic comes from human emotions.

It’s notable that the only time the show explicitly states that magic comes from pain prior to season 4, is in season 1 when Dean Fogg is trying to create a functional army of students to face a monster. He needs to get them as many tools as he can, as quickly as he can. However, pain is one of the easiest emotions to inspire in people, in a stable way. (Especially graduate students.) So even if magic doesn’t come only from pain, the need to create a functional student army might necessitate some shortcuts and simplifications.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the only way. Humans have lots of emotions, and emotions are difficult to control; the small amounts of actual magical education we’ve seen at Brakebills tend to center around precision and control.

And, when we do see the students using their magic? Quentin’s magic seems to come from love as much as it does from pain. Alice’s high level of power correlates with her impeccable control, but her magic also comes from wonder and fear. Julia’s goddess magic is related to caring, but curiosity and passion for magic drive her more normal magical skills. We see Margo, Eliot, and Quentin all do battle magic in moments of anger and fear, and Kady who does them with measure of anger and calm and the space between those two feelings. The only difference is that we see these things, instead of being told them. We understand them, because they are human feelings.

But that’s what Alice couldn’t understand as a niffin and what was missing from her theory: the human element of magic. Human emotions. Because, if you watch the show, you will see that magic doesn’t come from pain. It comes from the ways that each person connect to each other and the world around them with their feelings.

Right now, my personal source of magic is my disappointment. I honestly believed that the storylines that the majority of season 4 of the magicians were setting up were some of the most phenomenal storytelling I’ve ever seen on television, and that the season would follow through on the themes and character arcs it set up. The show has surprised me with its depth and thoughtfulness in the past, and I felt that was a good enough reason to trust the current season to do the same; to treat queer stories with the same depth and nuance as it treated stories about the psychological trauma of murdering someone you trusted and to treat stories about bodily autonomy and choice with the same respect as rape survivor stories.

I admit, I enjoy guessing what will happen next in stories--sometimes I guess things correctly--but I am not particularly partial to my own hypotheses. I was looking forward to being surprised by all the new terrible ways that the characters fucked up in the finale and how the consequences of their actions would set up new emotional and narrative challenges for them. What I feel like I got instead was a disconnected story about how a depressed bisexual man had to die because destiny demanded it, and that no one else could escape their similarly axiomatic storylines in order to take on their current narratively-relevant conflicts.

And that means that I would have liked to see Julia get to make a choice--even if it was the wrong one--about her own body. It means I would have liked to see a suicidally depressed bisexual man want to live instead of having to walk away from it all. It means I would have liked to see Kady take on Everett, and that I would have liked to see Zelda actually sacrifice something for the new morals that she’s learning. It means that, yes, I would have loved to have seen Eliot and Quentin address the questions of what feelings they have for each other, and why Quentin was willing to play lackey for an eldritch monster just to get Eliot back. And I would like to see every single complication that would come about because they choose to do risky things based on their feelings for others that might be right or wrong or both, but always have consequences.

So even though the story that I felt, just based on narrative comprehension, was going to be about complex emotional relationships between characters and how they responded to challenges ended up, in the end, being a much flatter and less nuanced story about pain is the only one of those feelings that really matters in the end because we can’t change our stories anyway, so why try.

And maybe you don’t see a reason to try, but luckily you’re not the only one capable of writing fanfiction. I love the idea of The Magicians, and the show was right. The idea of it IS enough. I think we, as a fandom, can do better than a 4-season-long untagged MCD darkfic. And in the end, the most magical thing is not the show, or the simplistic use of pain. It is the way in which so many people can connect emotionally to the story, to the characters, and to each other. And we won’t only be fueled by pain, but I’m sure we’ll find some meaningful stories to tell, anyway.

Thanks for writing most of a good story, I have enjoyed engaging with it. I hope you get everything you ever wanted from it.

Sincerely,

AJ

**Author's Note:**

> First of all, thanks to Scorn and everyone from the RAO discord for your support and feedback <3
> 
> I have been wanting to write a meta essay about Alice's goal to find a unified theory of magic. I had planned to talk more about how the different characters' magical disciplines were related to their emotional strengths as characters. This is not the essay I was planning to write. 
> 
> After watching the finale I had a hard time sleeping, with so many thoughts and feelings jumbled up inside my head. Writing them out was a way to organize my thoughts and feelings and find at least some of the catharsis that the finale promised and did not deliver (for me; ymmv ofc). 
> 
> I still think it's odd that Q's death is supposed to be a risky, subversive, and/or surprising thing, because it was clearly telegraphed in the text in a way so disconnected from the story themes that I had actually used the foreshadowing elements to discredit it as a possibility--too obvious while being at the same time not actually making sense as a byproduct of the narrative. I think Quentin's death could have been narratively interesting, but I do not think this is that story. This, combined with the showrunner statements in PR and interviews surrounding the finale leaves a bad taste in my mouth as a viewer and a fan, and I am going to have to wrestle with these thoughts for a while. 
> 
> One thing that is clear to me, over and over, is the emotional power of stories, and I am reminded again how important it is to have access to stories that respect our identities and our weaknesses. I thought this story did that, but I was mistaken. I wish I had something less cynical to say. 
> 
> As a final note about how shallow the "magic comes from pain" reading is, a friend shared this quote from the books with me (since I have not read them):
> 
> "He’d been right about the world, but he was wrong about himself. The world was a desert, but he was a magician, and to be a magician was to be a secret spring – a moving oasis. He wasn’t desolate, and he wasn’t empty. He was full of emotion, full of feelings, bursting with them, and when it came down to it, that’s what being a magician was. They weren’t ordinary feelings – they weren’t the tame, domesticated kind. Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world."


End file.
